The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [105]
I got back in the car and drove around, looking for anything that was familiar from the book, but the shops and cafés all seemed to have gone or been renamed. I stopped at the high school. The main doors were locked – it was four in the afternoon – but some students from the track team were drifting about on the playing fields. I accosted two of them standing along the perimeter and asked them if I could talk to them for a minute about the Clutter murders. It was clear that they didn’t know what I was talking about.
‘You know,’ I prompted. ‘In Cold Blood. The book by Truman Capote.’
They looked at me blankly.
‘You’ve never heard of In Cold Blood? Truman Capote?’ They hadn’t. I could scarcely believe it. ‘Have you ever heard of the Clutter murders – a whole family killed in a house over there beyond that water-tower?’
One of them brightened. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘Whole family just wiped out. It was, you know, weird.’
‘Does anybody live in the house now?’
‘Dunno,’ said the student. ‘Somebody used to live there, I think. But now I think maybe they don’t. Dunno really.’ Talking was clearly not his strongest social skill, though compared with the second student he was a veritable Cicero. I thought I had never met two such remarkably ignorant young men, but then I stopped three others and none of them had heard of In Cold Blood either. Over by the pole-vaulting pit I found the coach, an amiable young social sciences teacher named Stan Kennedy. He was supervising three young athletes as they took turns sprinting down a runway with a long pole and then crashing with their heads and shoulders into a horizontal bar about five feet off the ground. If knocking the hell out of a horizontal bar was a sport in Kansas, these guys could be state champions. I asked Kennedy if he thought it odd that so many of the students had never heard of In Cold Blood.
‘I was surprised at that myself when I first came here eight years ago,’ he said. ‘After all, it was the biggest thing that ever happened in the town. But you have to realize that the people here hated the book. They banned it from the public library and a lot of them even now won’t talk about it.’
This surprised me. A few weeks before I had read an article in an old Life magazine about how the townspeople had taken Truman Capote to their hearts even though he was a mincing little poof who talked with a lisp and wore funny caps. In fact, it turns out, they disdained him not only as a mincing little poof, but as a meddler from the big city who had exploited their private grief for his own gain. Most people wanted to forget the whole business and discouraged their children from developing an interest in it. Kennedy had once asked his brightest class how many of the students had read the book, and three quarters of them had never even looked at it.
I said I thought that was surprising. If I had grown up in a place where something famous had happened I would want to read about it. ‘So would I,’ Kennedy said. ‘So would most people from our generation. But kids these days are different. A lot of them can barely read. And you just can’t teach them anything. There’s no spark of enthusiasm there. It’s as if years of watching TV have hypnotized them. Some of them can hardly speak a coherent sentence.’
We agreed that this was, you know, weird.
There is nothing much to be said for the far west of Kansas except that the towns are small and scattered and the highways mostly empty. Every ten miles or so there is a side road, and at every side road there is an old pickup truck stopped at a stop sign. You can see them from a long way off – in Kansas you can see everything from a long way off – glinting in the sunshine. At first you think the truck must be broken down or abandoned, but just as you get within thirty or forty feet